Networked Wizard-of-Oz Experiment to Study the Effect of Communication on Decision-Making Performance

摘要

Verbal communication is a crucial aspect of Naval Command and Control (C2) environments. In the Combat Information Center (CIC) of Navy ships, the communication load is at times so heavy that it overwhelms the communication net and disrupts the communication process. We began this research to identify verbal communication that could possibly be eliminated or transferred to the computer interface to reduce traffic on the command net Identifying tasks that can successfully be handled by the computer is especially timely in light of attempts to cut costs through reduced manning efforts. This report describes an experiment to compare human-to-human, human-to-computer, computer-to-human, and computer-to-computer communications. The task is a one-person version of a team decision-making task. The software is a Wizard-of-Oz simulation in which the participant must determine the threat level of two targets. The communication of information and the appropriate acknowledgments can be either verbal or computer generated. The results of an experiment using Naval officers suggest that communication mode affects information-gathering strategies but not the quality of the decisions.